LMS Princess Class 4-6-2 No. 6201, Princess Elizabeth passed through Rainhill this morning with the North Wales Coast Express from Liverpool Lime Street to Holyhead, 180 years after the Rainhill Trials were held on the same stretch of line.
Anyone who has looked around a new housing development in recent years can’t fail to have noticed how new houses are getting smaller and smaller. Developers use tricks such as specially made ‘three-seater’ sofas that are only as long as a normal two-seater; doors are left off and TVs are conspicuous by their absence – all to hide the fact that the room is woefully small.
A recent survey by Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, has confirmed that new houses in the UK really are the shoeboxes of Europe.
The average floor space of a new UK home is only 76 square metres. That’s 13%, 21% and 32% less than Ireland, Spain and France respectively and just over a third of the space enjoyed by Australians and Americans.
The problem here is that developers get greedy, trying to cram as many of these overpriced shoeboxes onto a plot of land, while the local council planning department, who should really be the ones policing this and refusing permission, have a conflict of interest as more houses means more council tax. It is hardly surprising that those houses that do have garages, rarely contain a car as they have out of necessity become storage rooms or converted living spaces because the original design was lacking in space. Overcrowded developments also have detrimental effects on local traffic congestion.
New houses should have a minimum floor area and a minimum land area around it. If these are not met then the selling price that the developer can demand should be limited. We should also be forcing new-builds to have cellars.
6233, Duchess of Sutherland passed by Horwich this morning with the Cumbrian Mountain Express, the first ever Duchess to work north from Bolton to Chorley. The steps to the right of the picture indicate the site of Horwich Fork signal box.
It returned later on, passing through Blackrod Station in the evening:
Ironman UK 2009 was held in Bolton this year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to the swimming or cycing stages, but managed to catch the frontrunners as they made their first pass through Horwich.
This is Philip Graves running through Horwich with almost a seven minute lead in the first part of the marathon section. He went on to win the event.
Apparently, the driving school BSM is to replace its basic vehicle for learners – the Vauxhall Corsa – after signing a deal with Fiat. The reason given is that the first car purchased by 70% of learner drivers (mainly young women it would seem*) is the same model as they learned in, although I rather think the discount offered by Fiat had more to do with BSM’s decision.
How things have changed. I learned to drive in an Austin Metro and would have never even considered such an awful car.
* obviously young men can’t afford to drive as they are discriminated against by the insurers.
I was recently trying to explain to someone how call-waiting works (Talk Talk had enabled it on her line without explaining what it was or how to use it, so she though the beeping was a low battery warning)
“Just press Recall (or R) when you hear the beeps”, I said.
“I can’t find Recall (or R)”
Surely all modern phones have a recall button (or so I thought)
“What model phone is it?”, I asked.
“a BT Freestyle 2010”
A quick Google later produced the user manual, and on page 23 you find:
assuming of course that the original and new callers haven’t both given up by now and hung up. Why is this buried in a menu? Surely the Recall function should be as accessible as the buttons for dialling and hanging up. Given that BT promote this type of calling feature they should make the phones feature-friendly.
I ended up explaining how to disable call-waiting (#43#)
While using the app “WiFiZone@UK” I got the error message “Low mem2” on the iPhone (3G OS 3.0). Tapping OK cleared the error message which repeated several times.
I haven’t seen it since and a Google search doesn’t help.
Has anyone else seen this or have any idea what this semi-cryptic message means?
Scientists from Imperial College London are asking that schools be closed in the autumn term to reduce the spread of swine flu.
What they fail to mention is that this will effectively close thousands of businesses and more importantly the hospitals vital to treating the more serious cases, as parents are forced to stay off work to look after their children.
Maybe those giving the advice don’t have children, or are paid enough to be able afford to have the nanny look after the children.
I’ve been cutting our old shed down to make a playhouse for our children. The new front has a small window, so for safety I wanted to use Perspex, or to use its generic name, acrylic sheet. Wickes wanted 15 quid for a 2mm thick sheet 1220×600 but I only needed something 420 x 385 and they don’t do anything smaller. 2mm was also a bit thin; B&Q do a 4mm thick sheet but for 24 quid. Screwfix, as ever, were cheaper (half the price) but you need to buy five sheets – fine if you’re building these for a living but not for a one-off.
I then turned to ebay, and found several sellers offering smaller sheets around the A4/A3 size. I found one selling a sheet 500×500 – almost perfect. The listing even mentioned cut-to-size and included an email address so I fired off a quick email and they quoted me a 3mm cut-to-size piece delivered (to my work address for convenience) for £2.69 + £3.50 delivery.
So if you are after a piece of acrylic (or other plastic material), I can recommend Retail Engineering Design Limited.
We’ve had an odd one today: Before installing a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 on a Vista machine, we thought it best to uninstall an older version 2 that was on the system in case anything got fouled up by the new version (or rather the old version fouled up the new install).
That was easier said than done. There is no uninstall option under Program files, so Control Panel was used, but it threw back the error that the “‘Uninst.isu’ file is not valid”. Reinstalling version 2 in an attempt to fix any corruption was also not successful, but we then noticed that the uninst.isu filedate had not changed.
After trashing the file, we again reinstalled v2 and uninstall then worked OK.